Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer took aim at the media and expressed his frustrations over the backlash the administration has received from the “alternative facts” term White House aide Kellyanne Conway used in an interview with “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd on Sunday.
According to Spicer, the term “alternative facts” had been taken out of context.
“Alternative set of facts — and what she meant by this is — that we reached out to one group of folks for riderships and there was another group that did that — and again, we weren’t by any means trying to mislead anyone. We asked for a set of facts. We thought that the facts that were coming in, in the time we were giving to respond, were accurate. There are times like anything else, it’s not alternative facts. It’s that sometimes you can watch two different stations and get two different weather reports. It doesn’t mean that the station was lying to you.”
Spicer went on to explain how the press had manipulated Conway’s remarks and that there was a case to be made for their claims on last Friday’s inauguration.
“The press was trying to make it seem like we were ignoring the facts,” he continued. “Sometimes when you look at a situation sometimes, in the same way you can look at a weather report and one weather report comes out and says it’s going to be cloudy and the next one since it is going to be light rain. No one lied to you. It just means you interpreted the data in a way that you felt got you to a conclusion. And I think this idea that we are immediately lying because — let’s take the audience. We were right. If you add up the number of people who watched that online, on Twitter, on YouTube, it broke all sorts of records.”
“Even CNN got 16.9 million people watching it online,” he added. “And yet you combine it with what Fox did online, how many people streamed it … how many people watched it on the broadcast networks combine all that. Where are their facts? Because I got called a liar for something I can add up and say here is how we come up with this number. And yet, where is the number that disproves that I am wrong? Let’s get back to something I was saying earlier. The default was, you are lying. Whereas, I was willing to put numbers out there. In the case of the transportation part, yeah, I wasn’t wrong — I used a set of numbers at the Metro authority came out with.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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